Threads for barnacs
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I’ve been using an Acer Chromebook 14 for well over a year now. Installed linux the day I got it, have been perfectly happy with it ever since. Lightweight, long battery life, specs more than enough for coding, web browsing, full hd movies, that sort of stuff. Aluminum body. The thing costs only a couple hundred bucks so even if you happen to lose/break it, you can get several replacements and still stay below $1k.
They now seem to have a 15” version with probably slightly more up to date hardware as well: https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/NX.GPTAA.002
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wyager
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5 years ago
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Bitcoin Gold, a new Bitcoin full-history fork on the GPU; SegWit2x; Bitcoin core claims “Bitcoin” and “BTC” names
I’ve only been keeping loose track of what’s going on, but bitcoin core/blockstream feels like a hostile corporate takeover of bitcoin, especially with how they’ve been trying to patent things and then implement technical changes conducive to the success of those patents.
The decisions made in the name of partial backwards compatibility (the way P2SH works, segwit) have been extremely poor from a technical standpoint and seem more like a bid for job security through obfuscation than anything that belongs in high-assurance software.
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As far as I can tell, everyone involved is questionable. The “Bitcoin Cash” fork has a number of important and relevant points on bitcoin scaling … and then puts forward Craig “not Satoshi” Wright as any sort of expert in anything whatsoever. What. (And Wright’s company, nChain, is also accumulating patents at a rate of knots and sabre-rattling about who they will and won’t licence them to.)
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I think belief in Craig Wright’s claims of being Satoshi vary a lot. I think it’s unfair to draw a connection between Bitcoin Cash and Craig Wright - there’s no official connection at all and most people like me consider him an irritant in the community rather than a luminary. While some Bitcoin Cash supporters believe Craig Wright that doesn’t speak for everyone. Given that he’s being investigated by a fraud squad I feel his claim is dubious at best.
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I think he’s deep in the guts of the Bitcoin Cash effort and is working directly with its promoters, c.f. a speaking slot at Future Of Bitcoin, he and his many fans (all of a remarkably similar writing style) on /r/btc, etc., etc., etc. They’re actively putting him forward, he’s not just showing up of his own volition and jumping to the front of some existing crowd.
I also don’t see how anyone could look at the evidence and think Craig Wright had anything whatsoever to do with the creation of Bitcoin. I mean, evidently >0 do, but what the.
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Blockstream has some patents on LN stuff, which I believe they’ve put under the Defensive Patent LIcense. People are patenting blockchain-related stuff, so not patenting may not be a viable option.
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I’ve been keeping a close eye on things and to me it seems like the exact opposite. Bitcoin core developers are the only group that care about the longer term viability and improvement of bitcoin. They make technically justified decisions towards improving the protocol with as little disruption to the ecosystem as possible.
In contrast, most other entities seek short term benefits. Miners want higher profits, businesses want to remain relevant and maximize profits, users want tx fees to be as low as possible right now. But very few seem to care about how today’s decisions shape the protocol long term.
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I think your assessment is pretty accurate. Blockstream is a company who wants to make a profit by selling their only product “Liquid”. I believe their strategy is to take over the core development team and then deliberately mismanage bitcoin in such a way that fees are unpredictable and high. This part has already happened. With all these problems at some point Liquid looks like a necessary technology just to make things work again. Once adoption of Liquid is widespread they can start making money by acting as fees gatekeepers on bitcoin.
It seems like a dumb plan but given that Liquid is literally their only product it’s the only business plan that makes sense given their actions.
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I’ve been running Arch linux on an Acer Chromebook 14 (specs and price point similar to the one in the article) for a while now and I’m pretty happy with it. A decent level of security can be achieved by using full disk encryption, especially if storing your LUKS key on a USB stick. And I strongly believe that not running ChromeOS with a google account is way better for privacy.
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Most of these conferences, foundations and consortia are just about corporations trying to ride the “blockchain” hype for profits. Most of them don’t actually need or want a decentralized, permissionless, immutable database.
However, I believe there are valid use-cases and need for real blockchains. Bitcoin provides censorship-resistant, pseudonymous value transfer. The blockchain is only meant as a settlement layer, because byzantine fault tolerant global consensus is indeed slow and expensive. Scaling solutions are being built on top of it, providing throughput comparable to VISA (see lightning network). The guys over at Syscoin are building a decentralized marketplace backed by a blockchain, kind of like OpenBazaar but without the need to run a node 24/7.
Don’t write off blockchains yet. If you look behind the hype, you’ll find true value there.
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